Saturday, April 24, 2010

I have always had a love-hate relationship with pad thai. I ate pad thai for the very first time at a Thai restaurant in San Diego. An evening dinner out on a student budget used to be a huge treat then! A group of us had once visited a decently good Thai place which was bus-accessible (bus-accessibility was a must for any outing!). As it was our very first Thai experience, we had pretty much asked the waitress to order the menu for us and she had suggested a spicy pad thai followed by some sweet coconut ice-cream! I absolutely loved the flat rice noodles drenched in a tangy, hot and sweet sauce and crunchy peanuts on top.

Over the time though I realized that a good pad thai is not easy to come by. Many times either the sauce is too strong or the whole dish is soggy or oily! After a few unfortunate encounters with pad thai I eventually changed my thai restaurant go-to dish from pad thai to a green curry dish which probabilistically is always decent.

But the cravings for a good pad thai won't stop! Then recently I came across this Mark Bittman's minimalist column urging people to think about pad thai as a make-at-home option and I wondered why I never thought about making pad thai at home. Strange how sometimes in your mind some dishes just get so associated with restaurants that you don't ever think of making them at home! The recipe seemed easy enough, was uber-flexible and luckily I had all the ingredients at hand (thanks to my new work route which is en-route an ever-inviting asian store).

I made this dish on a weekday evening. It came together fairly quickly. You make the sauce (which is just putting things together in a bowl), soak the noodles in hot water and meanwhile stir fry the ingredients and bring everything together in a wok. Easy breezy!

The pad thai was extremely tasty. My husband and I enjoyed it with some hot peach flavored tea which was a most flavorful gift from a grad-school friend. All-in-all a pad thai dinner well-served at last!

4Tbsp tamarind paste (taste your tamarind paste; every one is different. If its very tart, use less to begin with and then add more as you go. For 8ounces noodles, I needed 4Tbsp Joy tamarind concentrate)

3Tbsp rice wine vinegar

4Tbsp sugar

3Tbsp fish sauce

3/4C warm water

Stir-fry:

2 cloves of garlic - minced

14oz extra firm tofu

4 bok choy or some chopped chinese cabbage

1 egg (optional)

peanut or canola oil

Garnish:

handful of roasted chopped peanuts

chopped scallions

bean sprouts

lime or orange wedges

crushed red pepper

Recipe:

** Fish sauce as the name says is not vegetarian. It has fermented anchovies. You can get a fake 'fish' sauce which is vegetarian or just omit that ingredient and adjust the other flavors accordingly.

** Egg is optional. Feel free to omit it for a vegetarian meal.

** Tofu can be easily replaced with shrimp or any other protein if you prefer.

Prepare the sauce:

Mix all the sauce ingredients. Taste. It should not be very tangy or very sweet. Adjust the ingredients per taste.

Prepare the noodles:

Pour warm water over the dried noodles in a large bowl. Cover and let stand for 10mins or so until the noodles are cooked through.

Prepare the stir-fry:

Chop tofu and bok-choy into small byte sized pieces. In a wok or a large non-stick pan, heat some oil on high heat. When the oil is very hot, add tofu pieces. Fry on each side for a few minutes until the tofu skins are crispy. Remove the tofu from the pan and set aside.

Add a little more oil to the pan if desired. Add garlic and bok-choy and stir fry for a few minutes on high heat. Add the egg and scramble for a few minutes.

Put everything together:

Add the noodles and the sauce back to the pan. Mix well; add some salt and cook for a few minutes until the noodles absorb most of the sauce (do not overcook).

59 comments:

Your journey on the discovery to the best pad thai ,sounds very interesting,as muc as does everything in ur wonderful blog...Ur pics sure look like u topped the better /best restarnts in town:-))and love how easy u make it sound and yeah i love Marks recipes too ,but ur pic here is really super...how is the move to the new place, u sure seem settled by now with dear hubby:-)))Super weekend to u...

lovely pictures and wonderful recipe ...i have never had pad thai n now i know how to go about it.green curry n even hot red curry are my fave thai food n i make the paste myself...Have to look for rice noodles , bean sprouts are rare to find too...though i make my own tofu.....hey your pics are enticing me enough.

Mia, thanks! The recipe is really very easy... as I was typing it up I thought that your wonderful shrimps would be a great addition here!

Sangeeta, bean sprouts are very optional.. actually, thats the best part about this recipe, pretty much anything except the sauce and the noodles are swappable. So feel free to use whatever is easily available :)

Indo, so true, the best part about cooking at home is the variations. My husband does not like peanuts and the egg yolk so I can easily add just the egg white instead and skip the yolk and also experimenting with sauce flavors and stir fry veggies is fun to!

I love pad thai.. that is one of my fav if I go to thai restua. Its long time I did not prepare this ..u have reminded me and tempted me PJ. Sure this is going to be my tomm dinner. I too have posted it..take a look when u find time PJ.

Delicious pad thai.My hus favorite dih mine too but i always prefer the stir fry veg/chicken.yours looks so yummy and perfectly done..i think if we use the store bought pad thai sauce it should be very easy..

Nupur, thanks! I have had very good success rate with most of Mark Bittman's recipes so I also couldn't wait for this pad thai after seeing the minimalist column.

Inji, thanks! I hope you do give it a try and let me know how it goes :)

Pavithra, your pad thai version looks so delicious and yummy! love the addition of pickled radishes; i would have to look for them next time.

PranisKitchen, yes, store bought pad thai sauce will definitely make it easier specially if you don't own all the ingredients at home (which was the case with me a year or so ago). Things like fish sauce if you don't use regularly it might make sense to buy the pad thai sauce for a one time dish.

Lori, the video is really good as most of his minimalist videos are. This dish was really easy though, just as long as you have all the ingredients in the pantry.. because some of them aren't very commonly used once in our kitchens.

TasteOfBeirut, thanks! I am so glad you liked the photo :)

Aqua, thanks!

Sonia, he he, time to make some more pad thai then ;) see if you were living closeby I would say just stop by and I'll keep a plate ready but as thats not the case, I'll send you a virtual plate instead :)

Same pinch dear, I adore the Pad Thai and I love the green and yellow curry. I had the most amazing Yellow curry when we were visiting Nepal. If u like all these preparations then u must try a rice I posted a few months back, I guess I named it Indo-Thai fusion rice, infact it's very much a Thai phodnicha bhaat.LOL. Khoop masta jhala hota ani tula nakki avadel, you can change things according to ur taste and as u say an easy breezy one.I always make my pad Thai without the fish sauce and I love the bite of roasted peanuts.Your pic making me hungry.

hubby got some from Malayasia and we made a delicious pad thai dinner too. tye pics and recipe is awaiting their turn in my drafts. your recipe sounds authentic. would love to try this next time. looks wonderful.

I am altogether on different plane, I am still yet to try Pad thai, though i have heard a lot about it but still didnt get a chance to make it at home or even have it outside. Your journey sounds very interesting, i have had the similar journeys with my bakes but the love never stops growing :)As usual lovely pics :)

Wonderful recipe and a perfect click PJ! I would definitely love to try this one as it sounds very easy from what you have said! A nice trip accompanied with nice foods are always treasure to remember, a lovely write-up for this recipe! I enjoyed reading the post!

WOW PJ! I am soo making this dish :). I too love pad thai but I always thought it was too difficult to make at home.. and I so understand what you meant about the bus accessibility being a must for outing.. aah.. those grad school days :)

It's always a treat to come by your blog and find something totally different or unusual. They help stir my gray cells to think out of the box. Pad Thai looks great and you have instilled enough courage for me to give it a try myself

Hi PJ, I have never tasted a pad Thai before!!!, howzthat?, I have written some recipes in my book!!, and some thai cusines, like I wrote lot of baking things too.., when I never had a oven !!, you seem to know a lot about this dish and know it well, to how it tastes!! So, I concluded myself I am going to try yours!! and write to you how it turned out, thanks for the tips about sauces being a vegetarian.., BM it. Ibtwn, your clicks are so lovely, I loved each one of them..., you have got wonderful presentation skills..

Did you really use 4 tbsp or tamarind paste? I would think it would be incredibly sour. I saw the Bittman article and made it with 2 tbsp and thought the tamarind was all I could taste. Maybe I just have some really potent stuff.

Anon, yes, I did use 4Tbsp tamarind concentrate (the brand shown in the picture). It might be that different concentrates have different potency, I have always used the Joy concentrate from the Indian store so don't know about any other ones.. I also used 8ounces flat rice noodles (which is double of what the original recipe from Mark had used). So your 2Tbsp seems inline assuming it was for 4ounces noodles.

I am really impressed with your writing skills and also with the layout on your weblog.Is this a paid theme or did you modify it yourself?Either way keep up the excellent quality writing, it is rare to see a nice blog like this one nowadays.Here is my page ... free iphone

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